After five years of extensive prototyping and testing, Norco has released its new Team DH bike. The high-pivot downhill bike has been developed with the help of four-time world champion Greg Minnaar, and double world champion Danny Hart.
The Norco Team DH has been successful at the highest level already, with team rider Gracey Hemstreet racking up her first three Elite World Cup wins aboard an S1-sized prototype.
The new bike offers 200mm of travel via Norco’s HPV6 suspension system and is mixed wheel-size only, with no accommodation for a 29er rear wheel.
Five years in the making
It has been 25 years since the first Norco Team DH was released, and the new bike was in the prototype and development phase for five years.
The bike is centred around a high-pivot rear suspension configuration that uses an inverted four-bar (also known as upside-down FSR/Horst-link) to dictate the rear axle path. Downhill bikes such as the Forbidden Supernought use a similar system. The advantages of a high-pivot setup are that it maintains a more accentuated rearward axle path, which can help carry speed on rough terrain.
The Team DH’s shock is actuated by an additional pair of links extraneous to the four-bar system and Norco calls the whole package the High Virtual Pivot Six-Link (HPV6) suspension system. The six-link is a four-bar suspension system with an extra pair of links to actuate the shock, unlike a six-bar suspension system.
The Team DH uses an idler to control the anti-squat characteristics of the bike, necessary because of the high pivot position. The idler system is an i-Track adjustable version, which enables the rider to tune the level of anti-squat and pedal kickback offered by the HPV6 suspension system.
You can move the idler to find the best compromise between pedalling efficiency with high anti-squat (and the associated high levels of pedal kickback) and lower levels of anti-squat, which enables more pedal bob, but reduced levels of pedal kickback as the rear suspension moves.
There is more adjustment on offer via a patented flip chip on the shock mount. It enables a change of 2.5% in the rate of progression in the shock actuation ratio as the suspension goes through the travel.
The DH Team is supplied with custom shock tunes specified by Norco to work best with the bike’s suspension.
Frame geometry
The new Team DH pairs an aluminium front triangle with carbon seatstays and carbon chainstays. Norco says this allows for a stiffer front triangle and explains the carbon rear triangle was chosen to reduce unsprung mass, not alluding to its stiffness or compliance as a factor in the choice.
There are five sizes on offer: S1–S5. The five different aluminium front triangles are paired with size-specific rear centres to give all sizes proportionally similar geometry. The Team DH also includes reach-adjust headset cups for fine tuning the exact reach by +/- 5mm within each size.
Norco says reach ranges from 418mm for the S1 up to 498mm on the S5 in 20mm increments. The rear centre is 440mm on the S1 and S2, growing in 2.5mm increments to 447.5mm on the S5.
The head angle is 63 degrees on the S1 and S2 sizes and 62.5 degrees on the S3-S5.
Builds
There will be two builds available – the DH Team 2 Fox with a Fox 40 Performance Elite fork and a DHX2 Factory shock, and the DH Team 2 RockShox with a RockShox Boxxer Select D2 fork and Vivid Coil Base shock. Both bikes have a SRAM GX drivetrain and Maven Base brakes.
Continuing Norco’s Ride Aligned sizing philosophy, S1-S3 sizes are supplied with 160mm-long Praxis cranks, whereas S4 and S5 sizes get 165mm versions.
- Norco Team DH 2 Fox: $7,999 / $10,499CAD
- Norco Team DH 2 RockShox: $7,399 / $9,500CAD
- Norco Team DH frameset: $4,599 / $6,199CAD
